Liberation Archive

Dipankar Bhattacharya It is now 50 years since Naxalbari, an otherwise obscure area near the India-Nepal border in Darjeeling district of West Bengal, had stormed its way into India’s political vocabulary. It was a peasant uprising with a difference that raised the question of changing land relations to the level ...

(Excerpts from a poem written by Sameer Roy in 1968 during the Naxalbari movement – in memory of Rashmoni, a woman of the Hajong tribe who was killed by the police during the Tebhaga movement in 1946–47) Comrade, how old are we Why not take a stock. My mother, sitting ...

(‘Mukt Hobe Priya Matribhumi’ – The Beloved Motherland Will Be Free was one of the favourite songs of the Naxalbari movement’s revolutionaries, and it best embodies the movement’s spirit of ‘people-first’ patriotism.) The beloved motherland will be free – That day is not far today! Look, the red light of ...

Full one year has passed since the peasant struggle in Naxalbari began. This struggle is different from all other peasant struggles. Where is the difference? Peasants have always struggled against various injustices and oppressions. This is the first time that the peasants have struggled not only for their partial demands ...

(Excerpts from a piece by Vinod Mishra, Deshabrati, September 1990) Naxalbari means the beginning of a revolutionary political stream in national politics based on this peasant awakening. Naxalbari did not mean just fulfilling a few economic demands of peasants on a local basis. Those who wanted to create an alternative ...

(Excerpts from an article by Pranay Krishna (translated from Hindi) which appeared in the Deepavali Special edition of the Hindi daily Prabhat Khabar in November 2009) The Naxalbari peasant uprising of 1967 gave birth to a new imagination that left a deep, all-India impact on art, culture and literature. The ...

He says he wants bread and clothes Not only that, he wants justice too On top of that he wants genuine freedom too Hang him He says he wants regular work Not only work, he wants the fruits of his work And then he even wants untrammelled possession of both ...

Arikkad Varghese was one of the young Naxalite revolutionaries organizing the oppressed adivasi people of Wayanad. The Naxalite movement in that area challenged the intense feudal oppression of adivasis who served as bonded labour for landlords. In the course of the movement, an oppressive landlord Vasudeva Adiga and a suspected ...

(Comrade Shanti Munda is a veteran of the Naxalbari peasant uprising. Goutam Chakraborty and Basudeb Bose spoke to her at her home in Sebdolla Jote in Hatighisa village of Naxalbari to get a first-hand account of Naxalbari from this great fighter.) She does not remember the date or month of ...

Punishing Politically Assertive, Self-Reliant Dalits Who Refuse to be Foot Soldiers of Hindutva’s Hate Politics (On 5 May, Dalits in Shabbirpur village of Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh were attacked. A CPI(ML) team comprising comrades Afroz Alam, Bholaram Maurya, and Chunnilal visited Shabbirpur village and met the injured at the ...

Kavita Krishnan Presenting India’s human rights record at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva during the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Process in May 2017, Indian Government representative, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi made several claims about India’s human rights record. Here is a reality check about his claims. “Culture ...

– Madan Mohan Chamoli and Indresh Maikhuri Rajendra Dhasmana, born in Pauri Garhwal (Uttarakhand), intellectual-thinker, journalist-editor, theatre activist, cultural activist, and a strong voice of dissent in literature and politics, passed away on the night of 16 May 2017. He was 81 years old. He had been in government service ...

– S Kumarasamy SC is final not because it is infallible. It is infallible only because it is final. SC should accept that it can also commit errors. As Justice Karnan is a HC Judge, he can be removed only through impeachment which is possible only with the procedure prescribed ...

Following circulation of rumours on WhatsApp about child-lifting, seven people were killed on 18 May 2017 by lynch mobs near Jamshedpur in Jharkhand. Three of those killed in the first incident at Rajnagar on 18 May morning were Sheikh Sajju (25), Sheikh Siraj (26) and Naim (35). Another member of ...

In contrast to some of the shock wins for far-right forces internationally of recent months – the Trump victory and the British vote for Brexit in particular, the big news of the French Presidential election was not so much who won – the neoliberal reformer Emmanuel Macron – but the ...

(Based on Comrade Dipankar’s address at the inaugural session of the Marxism 2017 conference hosted by the Socialist Alternative group of Australia in Melbourne from 13 to 16 April, 2017) Three decades ago when the Soviet Union collapsed, triumphant ideologues of capitalism proclaimed the end of history. The global victory ...

— Kavita Krishnan (This article first appeared on 31 March, 2017 on Kafila.online) It’s been twenty years since the assassin’s bullets took Chandu away from us, at 4 pm on 31 March 1997. I still recall my sheer disbelief when a phone call from my party office at my hostel ...